Mediated Landscape/Mediating Photographs: Surveying the Landscape in Nineteenth-century Canadian Topographical Photography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The photographs produced as part of Canadian topographical and geological surveys between 1858 and 1890 have teetered between readings of document and art. This is further complicated by the archival and museum collections into which they have been absorbed, institutional divisions that reinforce the distinctions between historical document and aesthetic artwork. This thesis addresses such unresolved tensions by considering topographical photographs as both mediated and mediating in their ability to bridge and accommodate a nexus of antithetical readings – maker and viewer, authorial intent and collective imagination, art and document, subjective and objective, land and landscape. The survey work of four photographers is examined: Humphrey Lloyd Hime (1833-1903) on the 1858 Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition; Benjamin F. Baltzly (1835-1883) on the 1871 Geological Survey of Canada expedition; Alexander Henderson’s (1831-1913) commissions to document the structures of the Intercolonial Railway, the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa & Occidental Railway, and later as superintendent of photographs for the Canadian Pacific Railway; and Charles George Horetzky (1838-1900) on various expeditions between 1871 and 1877 with the Canadian Pacific Railway Survey. In each case study, the photographs are understood as oscillating between functions and readings of science and art. Special attention is given to the texts left behind by each photographer. Biographical histories are compiled from archival findings in order to develop a network of relationships. The circulation of the photographs in scientific, governmental, artistic, and popular arenas is also traced. This thesis argues that by studying nineteenth-century Canadian survey photography within art history what emerges is the foundation of a mutually influential relationship between not only photography and painting, but also between art and document, and the Picturesque and the Romantic. My intention is to demonstrate that while survey photographs can reveal historical context, they also reveal art historical context in the ways that land becomes a landscape through visual representation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".